Plan, Personalize, and Promote: Your Holiday Marketing Playbook
Now that the holiday marketing planning season has begun, retailers need to assess their entire planning, design, and production ecosystem.
The December holiday season is a typically stressful time for consumers these days, with early shopping plans beginning well before Black Friday. But for retail marketing and advertising directors, the stress starts much earlier.
With today’s competitive and increasingly complex multichannel media landscape, retailers need a more efficient way to plan and execute holiday campaigns—faster, with better, more measurable financial results.
With multichannel media, retailers need a better way to execute holiday campaigns.
of every size. But there’s more. Retail marketing campaigns must also feature many products—out of the thousands they sell. Each advertised item includes a myriad of detailed information stored in a Product Information Management or PIM system. It also has numerous logos, images, and videos stored in a Digital Asset Management or DAM system.
Start Early, Stress Less
It’s not just a matter of moving the start date back. Even if creative service managers and production managers had unlimited hiring budgets, there are just too many tasks involved in a campaign. The only solution is to look at the big picture and employ a centralized approach to campaign planning, along with a system that automates the numerous manual steps involved in campaign execution.
The solution is a centralized campaign planning approach—one that automates the many manual steps involved.
It begins with the data. Retailers must deal with a mountain of product information, typically provided by manufacturers with varying ideas on how their data should be structured. To cope with all this, retailers must store all that data in Product Information Management (PIM) and Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems, as well as other databases for pricing, inventory, and sales history.
All this data must be integrated, of course. However, to be effective, it must be supported by a collaborative workflow—one that connects all stakeholders, both internal and external, to the entire campaign. Retail CMOs and their directors of marketing and advertising need to know which products to promote for the holidays. No matter how good their intuition may be, they also need to have ready access to data, including pricing, margins, sales history, and numerous other factors.
Fortunately, Comosoft LAGO’s whiteboarding and campaign planning tools provide just such an overview, instantly drawing all the data needed to make smart planning decisions. These can be easily conveyed to design teams, who then utilize LAGO’s production automation tools to simplify layout
LAGO’s campaign tools provide an ideal overview, instantly drawing all the data needed to make smart planning decisions.
tasks, ensure greater accuracy, eliminate production bottlenecks, and optimize the review and approval process. Finally, LAGO-generated campaign performance can be tracked at the individual product level, providing planners with additional insights for improving results.
Multimedia Madness Managed
Even when retail holiday campaigns involved “only” an array of catalogs and other printed materials, the stress of dealing with deadlines and last-minute changes was intense, vastly increasing the likelihood of costly errors. Today, with the demand for regional catalog and flyer variations, not to mention the growing number of digital channels, the stress potential has grown exponentially.
Multiple versions can be produced and managed easily and automatically.
Both of these sources of pre-holiday stress (and cost) have been vastly reduced in the LAGO workflow. Multiple versions of any printed piece can be produced and managed efficiently and automatically, customizing each regional or demographic variation based on product pricing and availability data, rather
than relying on manual adjustments. Even the print and digital production steps are automated, sending the right files to the right service provider at the touch of a button.
LAGO excels at automating digital production across multiple channels, including websites and mobile apps. At the catalog layout stage, designers have access to tools for creating hotspots and other digital-only elements. Live product data from LAGO’s PIM
LAGO excels at automating digital production with tools for creating digital-only elements.
and DAM systems is kept consistent across all outputs. Further, designers can easily export the layout’s XML and JPEG/PDF data for automatic incorporation into digital media, as was successfully done with the Lowe’s mobile shopping app.
With so much complex data to manage and so many different channels to fill, using a manual process only amplifies the potential for costly errors. Only a centralized system, like LAGO, utilizing a Single Source of Truth data model, can effectively manage the demands of holiday campaigns.
Making it Personal—at Scale
An effective retail campaign is defined by its ability to connect with customers on a personal level. By utilizing AI-powered predictive analytics that simulate customer behavior, retailers can engage shoppers year-round, not just during the holiday rush. Personalization enables retailers to offer a customized blend of products and messages that resonate with a broad audience, rather than focusing solely on high-margin items. Marketing and advertising teams can transform customer and transaction data into actionable insights, fostering meaningful connections in every season.
Retailers must have the means of offering the right products in the channels customers prefer.
Consumer preferences for certain products can be discovered from a variety of data sources, including loyalty programs, social media, reviews, and seasonal purchasing history. Consumer behavior data can also be leveraged further, using artificial intelligence, to
identify and include related, high-value products—those with a high degree of shopper appeal—in each campaign.
Understanding what customers want is just the first step. Retailers must also be equipped to provide the right products through the channels that customers prefer. This strategy involves creating multiple regional versions of catalogs and flyers, each tailored to reflect the specific preferences and behaviors of distinct regions or demographic groups. It means replicating campaign elements across multiple channels, maintaining offer consistency and brand identity regardless of where it is viewed. It even means taking marketing data to the direct, one-to-one level—addressing relevant messages to qualified, individual customers and prospects.
The holidays will always be marked by intense activity, but marketing success does not need to mean stressful (and costly) manual effort. As a multichannel marketing production platform, LAGO eliminates bottlenecks by uniting campaign stakeholders, assets, production, and more in a single collaborative workflow for seamless holiday multichannel campaigns.
Want to take the chaos out of the holidays? See how Comosoft LAGO can transform your seasonal campaigns by scheduling a demo today.
